Playing with Photoshop

I love playing with Photoshop. Last night I was practicing removing stuff from photos. I have a snapshot of a cemetery in Wisconsin. It's not a great shot, the light levels are wrong, the colors are muted, and there is a plant stand, a rope and a road that detract from the image. So I removed the offenders, punched up the colors, and adjusted the levels and contrast. I also tried out the image in black and white.

And then I made them into a movie, to show how the photograph morphed. I haven't done these movies before, but it was really fun. I just wish I could remember what program I used...I really need to start taking notes on some of this stuff I do.

I am having a really good time with my reliable and big-memoried new computer!

Daily Alaska!

There is a lake next to the airport here, Lake Hood. Float planes take off and land here, and the lake is surrounded by docks where the planes are tied up. It's one of the things we do with visitors from out of state. There are so many places in Alaska that are accessible only by boat or plane that there are lots and lots of private planes buzzing around all the time.

I got a new computer! Because the old one sucked. It just was so unreliable, I couldn't take it. I am trying to get all our photos organized and sorted, a job made slightly more difficult because I really stupidly accidentally told Photoshop Elements to catalogue all the images on my external hard drive...all 100,000 of them. There is a scrapbook program on there and a bunch of games. Each with dozens of images. Plus several backups of our photos, so that there are two or three or eight copies of a bunch of photos.

I am so sick of dealing with it, and still have another 50,000 images to delete, and another 30,000 to organize. I cannot believe we have that many photos, but I love taking photos. Dozens of photos...

Wildflowers.

My bloggy friend Kim at Frog Ponds Rock...These are for you and your Mum.









And because I know you love skies...

Whoa!

This whole senior advisor/senior spouse thing is still sorta freaking me out. Next week we will be having the entire brigade over for burgers and brats -- fortunately the entire brigade consists of about two dozen people so far. Whew.

But now I have to call a sergeant and tell him what I need from the unit for the BBQ. Weird. Like "Sergeant, I need some tables and chairs, and the Commander (woo. That's Mark. Again, weird.) will be tasking the various sections with bringing drinks and salads and stuff." Cannot begin to explain how strange this all is.

And to see Mark as the Commander. He was talking to a young soldier, and the soldier seemed kinda nervous. Yeah, because my husband is the big cheese. Hard to wrap my head around that one.

In other news, we are approaching the big race. Miles and miles and 70-some hours of sitting in a voyager canoe (a long canoe that can seat about a dozen people). I am not racing. Mark is, with seven friends, co-workers and complete strangers. It's the Yukon River Quest, if you want to google it. I have some photos of us in the canoe, still though trapped in the camera, since my computer is down. Still. With the blue error screen of severe annoyance.

(insert random and colorful swearing here. As spicy or tame as you would like. I am not fussy.)

This weekend they are doing more canoeing practice, so I will this time get a photograph of them in the canoe, from shore rather than from a middle seat. I really love canoeing, but sitting in a canoe for hours and hours and alll day and night and day and night and day and ....not for me.

Alrighty. Cannot sit here all afternoon. I must attempt to fetch a mower from self-help -- the Army hands out mowers and shovels and rakes and hoses and grass seed and various and sundry such items to those who live in government quarters -- our grass is getting ridiculously long. Except for the backyard, which suffered greatly under our dogs less than benevolent attentions over the winter.

Then I have to continue to clean and plan and obsess over this dumb brigade BBQ (it's really hard to remember to say Brigade instead of Battalion. Flailing around as the senior spouse, that's me...).

Plus the Army Birthday Ball is tonight, so I have various primping and preening and...let's just stop right there. I am wearing a dress, so all you ladies reading this know what I will be doing for the next several hours, and you gentlemen reading don't really want to know. Right? Right.

Hey! Two posts in less than a month? I am on fire!

I am around...

But very busy lately.

My computer has crashed, as well, which means I have to use Thor's to go online. Except Thor is home for the summer, so I have to compete with him for it. I don't always win...

Part of the reason I am so busy lately is that I am suddenly a "senior lady" and a "senior adviser"...that's what happens when your husband is the deputy commander of a brigade. Now I have new responsibilities and new meetings and social things to go to, which is great. I don't mind that part at all.

It might be a little weird for some of the spouses in our brigade, though, since I am so not the stereotypical LTC's wife, at least according to some enlisted spouses. I regularly hear how I am not at all like an officer's wife...

I am working on getting my photos -- which are on my external hard drive, not the crashed computer, thank goodness -- available for posting again, and I have a thousand digital copies of slides my father took, which means I can eventually, once I get this all straightened out, post photos of myself as a small and adorable child. Oh yeah, and my siblings, too. Not that they are or were as adorable as me.